Trinity Guardrails Will Face Tests Again, This Time by the State of Virginia

Trinity Industries, which has been accused of producing a faulty guardrail that can jam and spear through vehicles, will face more aggressive testing of its guardrails, but this time the tests will be conducted by a state.

Virginia officials have deemed the eight crash tests overseen by the federal government — tests that Trinity’s guardrails passed — to be inadequate. The Virginia officials are proposing six more tests with what they describe as stricter criteria. The tests are to begin this month.

The new tests will include having vehicles hit Trinity’s ET-Plus guardrails at slight angles — said to be representative of many car accidents and generally recommended under newer federal safety standards.

It would be a notable difference from the previous crash tests, which were criticized by some lawmakers for not requiring lower-angle situations, and for allowing Trinity to test its guardrails under older, less stringent rules.

On Tuesday, Trinity bristled at Virginia’s additional testing in a letter sent to the commonwealth’s attorney general’s office and obtained by The New York Times. The company demanded more information, including a detailed plan for the testing.

Trinity also criticized the use of the low-angle tests, calling them “nonstandard.” Because the ET-Plus was deemed eligible for federal funding in 2005, it still qualifies to be tested under older guidelines, even though they were updated in 2011. The older guidelines do not require a shallow-angle test, but do allow regulators’ discretion for further testing when they are investigating a particular vulnerability.

The company added that if Virginia intended to apply more stringent tests to the ET-Plus, it should do the same for the other brands of guardrail used in the state.

The Virginia attorney general’s office appeared to have little patience for Trinity’s demands, issuing a blunt reply on Tuesday.

“It would be a dereliction of duty for Virginia to fail to perform the low-angle test,” Richard Tyler McGrath, senior assistant attorney general, wrote. “Virginia is simply doing what it feels it needs to do for public safety.”

Trinity shot back at the attorney general’s office on Wednesday, arguing that if the Virginia Department of Transportation “truly maintains that such tests are ‘critical,’ it would be (to use your term) a dereliction of duty for the commonwealth to continue to install those competing products on its roadways when they have not passed V.D.O.T.’s new ‘critical’ test regimen.”

Jeff Eller, a Trinity spokesman, said that the Virginia transportation agency’s plan to “test only the ET-Plus system using arbitrary and nonstandard tests is being done to support its litigation agenda with the specific intent to make the product appear to fail.”

The Federal Highway Administration said it would monitor the results of Virginia’s tests. The office of Virginia’s attorney general declined to comment beyond Mr. McGrath’s letter. Scrutiny of the guardrail manufacturer is continuing. The Justice Department, with the cooperation of the Transportation Department inspector general’s office, is conducting a criminal investigation into Trinity and its dealings with the Federal Highway Administration.

In June, a Texas judge handed down a $663 million judgment against Trinity, following a trial held in October last year in a whistle-blower lawsuit filed by Joshua Harman, a competitor who discovered in 2011 that Trinity had made a critical change to the dimensions of its ET-Plus guardrail in 2005, but failed to tell federal regulators as required by law.

In that case, the jury found the company liable for defrauding the Federal Highway Administration, although the agency itself did not participate in the lawsuit. Trinity filed a notice of appeal in the case last month.

After the jury returned its fraud verdict, the federal agency ordered the eight crash tests. Trinity temporarily halted sales of the product and eventually more than 30 states suspended purchase of the units.

In March, the federal highway agency announced that the ET-Plus had passed the eight crash tests, including a final one in which the guardrail bent and smashed in the driver-side door of the test vehicle.

Virginia, which suspended further purchases of the guardrails before the verdict in the whistle-blower case, has been contemplating removing the units for almost a year. And the commonwealth has joined a state-level whistle-blower lawsuit against the company, claiming fraud for the thousands of guardrail units Trinity sold in Virginia. Similar whistle-blower lawsuits have been filed against Trinity in other states, but the attorneys general in three of those states so far have decided not to join the cases.Still, Senator Richard Blumenthal, a persistent critic of Trinity and the highway agency’s handling of the testing, praised Virginia’s actions.

“I think this is a watershed moment,” Mr. Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, said. “Clearly the states have concluded they cannot trust the Federal Highway Administration to get it right, and this signals to other states that they’ll have to fill in the gap themselves to determine if these guardrails are safe.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B3 of the New York edition with the headline: Trinity Guardrails Will Face Tests Again, This Time by the State of Virginia . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe